Years ago, in 2009, we were guests of Google at their headquarters in Mountain View, California (see our personal blog posts : 11/13/09 post, second post. The joint webinar we did with the Picasa team at Google is still viewable on Youtube it’s called Picasa Basics Webinar. I remember discussing with them the direction of Picasa and telling of how our audience wanted … needed … simple tools. At that time, their mission was to improve Picasa, to build more sophisticated photo editing tools that professional photographers wanted. Our opinion was that the power was in the simplicity and we lobbied for the simpler path.

Now we have Google Photos and I hear many comments that the photo editing tools are too limited, when you click the edit tool, you only have 3 options: 1)Basic Adjustments 2)Color Filters 3)Crop and Rotate. But, guess what?! Those 3 options cover 90% of what most people need to do with their photos. I think it’s GREAT! I think Google is on the right path with Google Photos. With just a few, easy options, people will actually use them, and their pictures will be so much better for it! Just the one click option for Auto Adjustments is SO good, it improves a picture in ways that took several adjustments, and lots of know-how, in other software. Here’s a short video to show you what I mean:

Photo Editing

If you want to learn more and start using Google Photos, become a Geeks on Tour Member and watch our series of videos on Getting Started with Google Photos.